If you’re a therapist running a your own practice, you may be wondering how much you should be spending on marketing or advertising; if at all. For some, marketing is essential to the continuity and growth of their business, especially group practices. For others, they just need to ensure they maintain a small waitlist of clients, so they can avoid any temporary drops in income due to losing a client.
What counts as marketing/advertising/promotion expense?
- Your Website – let’s people know you are legit. When they visit your website, it’s your opportunity to make a connection with them.
- Directories like Psychology Today
- Google Ads and Facebook Ads
- Agents, Marketers for hire, campaigns, etc
- Professional photography service for your profile or your website
- Any logo or graphics services you enlist
- Business cards, flyers, pamphlets, etc.
It’s important to note that, no matter what type of marketing and advertising you decide to invest in, you should focus on targeting the right audience. Your marketing efforts should be tailored to the people who are most likely to benefit from your services. For example, if you specialize in marriage counseling, you should focus your marketing efforts on couples.
How much to spend on marketing depends on what you are trying to accomplish
- maintain the level of clients you currently have?
- are you trying to gain more clients for yourself (growth) and/or gain more clients for your group practice (growth)?
Just trying to maintain the level of clients you have?
Percentage wise = zero % or no more than 5% would be my target.
Many of the therapists I work with just need to replace outgoing clients. They are spending $0 on marketing costs. They don’t need a website, they don’t spend for ads, and they aren’t listed on PsychologyToday. 100% of incoming clients are referral based, either by current/past clients, peers in the industry, or from complementary professionals like a pediatrician if you specialize in play therapy for example. Make some connections with other therapists or complementary professionals that could refer clients over to you. Try joining a local therapist group on Facebook or some other platform. Those groups are regularly referring potential clients to each other. Alternatively, you could sign up for Psychology Today and have potential clients reach out to you. Being on a popular directory is often enough to maintain a small waitlist.
Trying to grow your practice?
You either can spend, hustle, or a combination of the two. Let’s start with hustle:
Hustle
When I say hustle, I’m thinking that you are trading your time for money. So it still costs you something, we just won’t be able to capture it with a $ figure or a %. If you don’t have the spare money to pay for marketing help, then a hustle approach might be best for you.
Hustling could involve:
- Making connections with other therapists or complementary professionals that could refer clients over to you
- Be active on your local mental health Facebook page is a great way to make connections and get the jump on any referrals being shared.
- Maintain your own website.
- Write articles on other websites related to your target client. For example, if you work with children, perhaps you could write an article about therapy for kids on a pediatricians website or their mailing list.
- Put up flyers at the coffee shop bulletin board, etc.
- Reach out to local and larger companies to see if they’d either let you put up a flyer in their breakroom or maybe they’d like to contract with you to offer mental health services to their employees (I had group practice client do just that with a local tech company, and it turned out to be quite lucrative for her).
Get creative. Figure out what works and devote a certain amount of your time to that.
Spend
If you don’t have the time to invest in marketing but do have the funds, the amount to spend will depend on your budget. Generally, you should set aside 5-10% of your annual revenue for marketing and advertising. As a business owner of a very small business, carving out time for marketing is difficult, even when you outsource the work as you’ll still need to provide a lot of input. I’d suggest looking at what you can afford to spend on marketing and then shop around for the most appropriate channels and/or professionals that are not only within your budget, but also suitable in reaching your desired clients. Once you have enlisted the marketing services, keep an eye on the results, compare it to other marketing channels you are using, and identify the one which is most effective in bringing in the right clients. Invest more in that while cutting out the marketing services which are not yielding any results. You are essentially testing the different marketing services to find out which is giving you the maximum returns and then cutting out the ones which are not performing well, and putting all your marketing money into the successful one/s.
